Openwork

Openwork is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes research into experimental music, art, and scholarship. Interdisciplinary in scope, our journal promotes new modes of interaction between scholars and practitioners whose work critically re-listens through and across boundaries and constraints.

For our second issue, we seek artwork and articles exploring the concepts of ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’, critically engaging with the established and overlooked boundaries of these temporal markers and reimagining conventional histories, materialities, and subjectivities. We are particularly interested in contributions that engage with themes including musical memory, the Global South, temporalities of performance, narratives of pre-/-post digital, and the Anthropocene.

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Tay Day – Liverpool

June 12, 2024, University of Liverpool
9am–5pm with an evening Tay Day Cabaret
Samuel Murray and Amy Skjerseth, Organisers

On the eve of Taylor Swift’s arrival at Anfield, we invite scholars [including undergrads and postgrads], fans, critics, and musicians to an interdisciplinary exploration of the singer’s many eras. We invite 15-minute presentations on an array of Taylor Swift-focused topics, which include but are not limited to:

• Music and songwriting
• Touring
• Fandom / Swifties
• Ecological impact
• Digital platforms and social media
• Lyrics as literature
• Music videos
• Taylor’s versions and rerecording projects
• Artists and influences
• Anglophilia
• Animals
• Collaborators
• Fashion

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Place, Perspective and Popular Music

Venue: International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University
Date: 4-6 September 2024
Format: In-person

Theme: Place, Perspective and Popular Music

For this meeting of the UK and Ireland branch of IASPM, we invite colleagues to consider the fruitful relationships between music, place and perspective. Our use of these terms is intended to encourage discussion around how, where and when we situate our work in the broad discipline (and multiple subdisciplines) of popular music studies as we understand it here and now as well as then and there.

Place is physically located, for example in the spaces and places it represents, in the locations it emerges from and travels to, and in the material aspects of live music ‘ecologies’ – relations between venues, transport routes and their polities, the physical spaces in which recorded music is produced – institutional and domestic). Place is also imagined – both backwards (through nostalgia, tradition and memory) and forwards (through planning, urban and rural policies, ‘placemaking’, cultural initiatives).

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Mapping Music History

University of Aberdeen, 28 March 2024

Maps have long punctuated musicological texts, but only recently have music scholars begun to leverage maps as tools for analysing, organizing, and presenting research. In part inspired by the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities at large, historical musicologists are now paying greater attention to the geographical contexts in which past performances took place. At the same time – and fuelled by the increasing accessibility of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software – they can visualize and analyse complicated trends across time and place with greater ease than ever before. These developments in twenty-first-century digital cartography invite questions about musical practices in the context of other, older sorts of maps. For instance, we might ask how the zoning of civic space has regulated performers’ livelihoods, how travel writing has conditioned listening experiences, or how the policing of bodily display made entertainment venues a focus for state surveillance and control. Building on work across a range of disciplines – including but not limited to music and sound studies; art, literary, and theatre histories; urban geography; heritage and tourism; and digital humanities – this symposium seeks to explore the use of maps as objects and methods in music history.

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New Perspectives on the Musical Analysis of the Voice

International Conference, Université Lumière Lyon 2, Lyon, France, June 20-21, 2024

For a long time, the voice, embodied and fleeting, remained mute for music analysis. The privilege traditionally accorded by musicology and music theory to writing, both as composition and notation, and to instrumental music often relegated the voice in performance to a second-order, non-objectifiable musical dimension. The literature was dominated by pedagogical (singing treatises), physiological or acoustical,[1] philosophical or psychoanalytical considerations. Furthermore, except for certain singular vocal practices—most of which non-European[2]—, this work focused almost exclusively on singing in the Western art music tradition.

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A Century of Sound: Technology, Culture and Performance

The 8th Global Reggae Conference
+ Sound System Outernational #10
+ UWI 75th Anniversary

The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus
14 – 17th February 2024

From the 1940s to present day, sound systems have rocked the world with word, sound and power. From Kingston’s streets to the world’s biggest festival stages, the Jamaican-born institution of the sound system has deeply influenced the way music is produced, performed, remixed and enjoyed all over the world. The 2024 edition of the Global Reggae Conference celebrates and investigates the culture and technology of Jamaica’s most famous musical instrument.

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SEMSEC Annual Meeting 2024

The Society for Ethnomusicology, Southeast and Caribbean Chapter (SEMSEC), is pleased to announce the call for proposals for its 2024 annual meeting, to be held in hybrid format, March 2-3, 2024at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL.

The conference will be hybrid. We look forward to welcoming many presenters to campus in Tampa as well as online.

The Program Committee welcomes proposals from scholars working in a wide range of fields including ethnomusicology, musicology, music education, music theory, dance, art history, political science, anthropology, sociology, area studies, media studies, folklore, performance studies, popular culture, regional studies including but not limited to: African American, Hispanic, Southern, Caribbean studies, Indigenous, and diasporic studies.

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Places for Jazz in 21st Century Europe

Epistrophy, the jazz journal – n°6

Under the scientific direction of:
Stéphane Audard
With the collaboration of :
Mélodine Lascombes, Manon Fabre and Clément Séchaud

Throughout jazz history, changes in the places and contexts of dissemination have been closely tied to the rapid succession of styles and currents. These changes constantly inform who should play what, for whom, and how. The idea of a centre, the United States, and a fringe, the rest of the world, is widely debated in both jazz production and research, even in the earliest periods. It is necessary to consider the diverse range of locations, their associated portrayals, and their interconnections: dance venues, clubs, festivals, recording studios, schools, and so forth.

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Popular Music Education in Europe

Journal of Popular Music Education

Special Issue: ‘Popular Music Education in Europe’ (to be published summer 2025)

Guest Editors

Lucy Green (Emerita Professor of Music Education, UCL, UK)

Avra Pieridou Skoutella (C.C.R.S.M. Cyprus Centre for the Research and Study
of Music)

Europe is comprised of over 50 sovereign states and dependent territories which, within and between themselves, have multifarious cultures, sub-cultures, ethnic and religious groups, along with rich and diverse cultural heritage, values and customs, turbulent histories, and struggles of nationalist movements. Some of its contemporary states and people have been trying for decades to unite the European people under the European Union’s umbrella against the continuous influences of fragmentation, economic interests, histories, nationalism, and ideological and political dilemmas. The current times pose challenges, with wars, financial crises and intense immigrant phenomena. On the one hand, such circumstances largely leave European people limited or blocked by various forms of disadvantage from which they must constantly strive to liberate themselves. On the other hand, they empower people’s motivation for connection and connectivity, for expression and resistance, for empathy and solidarity, for surviving and thriving. In developing this Call for Papers, we are already faced with critical questions that we hope will be explored in the ensuing issue. What is popular music in contemporary Europe? Where did it come from? Who is Europe today, musically? How do the different musical ecosystems of European countries, cultures and sub-cultures influence and/or reflect popular music education? To what extent does music education in Europe acknowledge such influences? What is the relationship between music education and popular music in different educational systems of each country? To what extent can we talk about ‘European popular music’, or shall we talk about ‘Popular music in Europe’? Many more questions such as these are
imaginable.

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Music and the Moving Image Conference XX

Friday, May 24 – Sunday, May 26, New York University

The 20th iteration of the annual Music and the Moving Image Conference invites abstracts for paper presentations (20-min. limit) that explore the relationship between the vast universe of moving images (film, television, streaming media, video games, and advertisements) and that of music and sound. We encourage submissions from scholars and practitioners, as well as from multidisciplinary teams that have pooled their knowledge to develop new perspectives or solve research problems regarding the relationship between music and moving images. Abstracts will be adjudicated according to three factors:

• relevance of the author’s major arguments to existing scholarship;
• significance of the paper as an original contribution to the scholarly community; and
• clarity of presentation, including the use of language accessible to scholars with a variety of specializations.

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